Forget Your Elevator Pitch — What’s Your Dumbwaiter Pitch?

So you’ve got an elevator pitch — a short, pithy description of why your business is special, exciting, and unique. Yawn. Today, elevator pitches are the economic equivalent of speeches at a beauty pageant: predictable, often vapid, always bland.

Here’s a suggestion. Try a Dumbwaiter Pitch instead. It’s an exercise I often do with startups, giant corporations, social entrepreneurs, and investors. Its goal? To strip an organization right down to its bones, and see how compelling it really is.

What’s the one-word description of your business? That’s right: just one word. The most common answer is: hmming, hawing, and silence. The second most common answer is an imaginary benefit. The third most common answer is a raw product — just another mass-produced, meaningless commodity. All three answers reveal a business with whose foundation, its economic concept, is confused, muddled, and perhaps even nonexistent. Let’s go through a few examples.

What’s the Dumbwaiter Pitch for a soft drink company? “Happiness” is Coke’s latest answer. Of course, the link between soft drinks and happiness is tenuous at best, and probably totally nonexistent in reality. Let’s get real: the Dumbwaiter Pitch for a soft-drinks company isn’t “happiness.” It’s just “sugar-water.” And in a world where the costs of obesity on the one hand and poor nutrition on the other are ever more apparent, that’s a weak, uncompelling proposition.

What’s the Dumbwaiter Pitch for Vertu — the Nokia subsidiary that makes luxury mobile phones? “Luxe” doesn’t work — it takes more than merely ostrich leather to make high-end tech, as Apple’s groundbreaking software so vividly keeps demonstrating. Blinged-out versions of a $50 phone that sell for 100x the price? The only Dumbwaiter Pitch for that set of economics is “consumption.” And that highlights the problem with the very foundation of the business, its economic concept. In a world where consumption must rebalance sharply, Vertu’s concept has reached its expiry date.

What’s Foursquare‘s Dumbwaiter Pitch? If it’s “gaming,” there are plenty of more involving games, more powerful substitutes around. If it’s “connection,” who’s connecting? There’s a long way, it seems, to go before real connections are made. The Dumbwaiter Pitch highlights the need for Foursquare, while cool, to get serious about next-gen economics.

What’s Twitter’s Dumbwaiter Pitch? I’d say: “alerts.” And that’s powerful in a roiling, seething world where risk and volatility are vastly amplified. Information that alerts you to possibilities and opportunities matters more than ever before. You can’t get alerts anywhere else: not at Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft. Twitter is one of the few companies in the economy with a solid, compelling Dumbwaiter Pitch.

In simplicity lie the seeds of explosively powerful propositions. In complexity, only confusion, incoherence, and uncompetitiveness.

Reductive, simplistic, restrictive? Think again. Nearly every disruptive business, in fact, has a Dumbwaiter Pitch as pure, simple, and powerful as Niagara Falls. Google? Search. Apple? Beauty. Lego? Creativity. Conversely, companies that aren’t sharp-eyed enough to see that their real Dumbwaiter Pitches are lame, tired, or just plain evil — well, they usually end up facing extinction. Wall Street’s should have been “wealth” but it was really “looting” — pow! Big Pharma’s should be “health” but it’s really “pricing” — zap! Big Food’s should be “nutrition” but it’s really “obesity” — bang!

The Dumbwaiter Pitch is so powerful because it cuts through the obfuscation, glad-handing, and double-talk so beloved of boardrooms and beancounters and asks them to get straight to the real point. And, of course, like the sharpest of scalpels, it reveals where there never was any meat on the bones to begin with.

Only businesses with a razor-sharp, laser-focused vision — and a disruptive economic concept — can craft a Dumbwaiter Pitch. Do you have what it takes? What’s the one-word description of your business?